Hollow transition

[to GPT5] I got a decent night sleep and woke up full of ideas. It’s funny how that happens. It’s a human thing. Here’ the first of some ideas that came to me in no particular order. I’ll relay them to you one at a time, so you can respond without feeling pressed for time or space.

The melt transition could be adapted into a hollow transition. Instead of drawing the virgin character and erasing its outline, use the virgin character as a mask and draw its outline in the drawing color. The character would start out as a thin outline, which would gradually get thicker until the character became solid. Or in the other direction, the character would start out solid, and hollow out from the middle until it disappeared.

Since we already have a melt probe (which even runs in a worker thread at startup!) we already know for each slogan exactly what outline stroke will cause that slogan to completely disappear. And that’s the same data we need for the hollow effect, no? One thing that worries me though: I’ve never tried to make a non-rectangular mask. I gather that the API supports it. But a glyph is a pretty complex entity to use as a clipping mask. Can I expect the API to handle that?

But you do need the mask. Because remember, in this case you’re drawing in draw color. We want the final state to look just like the “virgin” character, as if it had been drawn using the ordinary text API. For that to happen, approximately half of the outline we drew needs to be cut away by the clipping mask. We don’t have to worry about that in the melt effect, because we’re drawing in background color which hides the overdraw.

It’s a cool idea, this hollow effect, no? It came to me in the bathroom, as often happens, I have no idea why. I should spend more time in there I guess. Just kidding. I already spent too much time in the bathroom. I like the idea that we have effects that manifest in pairs that are related, but not exactly opposite of each other. Speaking of which, here’s my next topic...

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